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Europe

Against the background of the great European war of the early twentieth century, Herbert Hoover’s idea of a scholarly institution collecting documentation on war, revolution, and peace was conceived and developed. Greatly expanded during the decades that followed, European materials now constitute the largest and most comprehensive part of Hoover’s international holdings.

The Hoover Institution’s new exhibition, Revolutions in Eastern Europe: The Rise of Democracy, 1989–1990, will open on Tuesday, March 11, 2014, in the Herbert Hoover Memorial Exhibit Pavilion (next to Hoover Tower) on the Stanford University campus and run through Saturday, August 16, 2014.

Eric Wakin, director of the Hoover Library and Archives, has announced the acquisition of an extensive collection of the papers of Joseph Goebbels, one of Adolf Hitler’s closest associates and followers, who in his later years was the infamous Reich’s minister of propaganda. The papers are mostly from Goebbels’ youth and university studies, before he joined the Nazi party in 1924. These papers are a strong complement to the original portions of the Goebbels’s diaries, which have been housed at Hoover since 1947 and are discussed in a recent Hoover Digest article.

The recently acquired Javier Benedet collection contains significant materials relating to the Spanish Civil War and to fundraising efforts in Northern California on behalf of the Republican side in that conflict. The Benedet papers also provide documentation on the plight of Republican refugees in the aftermath of the Civil War and on the political life of the Spanish anti-fascist diaspora in France, Mexico, and other countries. In terms of volume, the Benedet papers now constitute the second largest collection (after the Burnett Bolloten papers) in the archives pertaining to the Spanish Civil War.

Before the West became acquainted with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Leszek Kołakowski, Lech Wałesa, or Vaclav Havel, it was introduced to the works of Milovan Djilas, the first prominent dissident in the history of communist Eastern Europe.

A work of art by Belgian artist Floris Jespers was unveiled today at the Leuven Museum as part of its exhibition Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict, commemorating the centenary of the beginning of World War I and the devastation it brought to Leuven.

More than one hundred British government documents from nine archival collections at Hoover have been declassified. The majority, which are among the Charles Hill papers, are communications from the Office of the British Chargé d'Affaires in Beijing, 1966–68.

With more than four thousand images from the United Kingdom having been recently added, the Hoover Institution’s online, searchable poster database now has some eighteen thousand images of political posters from its collection.

Herbert Hoover Memorial Exhibit Pavilion located next to Hoover Tower, Stanford University

An exhibition of government posters, photographs, fine art, and rare editions of poetry from the collections of the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, and the Special Collections of Stanford University Libraries, guest curated by members of Professor Peter Stansky's class, Art and History: Modern Britain.

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The opinions expressed on this website are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Hoover Institution or Stanford University.